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Tag Archives: scifi

My 70s Sci-Fi Art tumblr, on which I post sci-fi art from the 70s, passed 5,000 followers last week! I’ve written about it before, back when I was proud that it had 300 followers, so now I’m chuckling lightly to myself about my past naivete. Which happens a lot. There may be a lesson here, and I’m sure I’ll chuckle lightly about it in the future.

At any rate, it’s picking up speed: today I added 120 new followers, which is a record for a 24-hour period. I’ve been posting a bit more, since I’m on winter break, but it proves that new people are still finding out about it every day. Take a look around the place. See what you think.

I have a habit of opening a draft in Gmail and using it to store random links that I need to access in the future. Then I forget to use them, and they accumulate. Here’s a list of the ones I currently have, for your enjoyment.

1. 8 links to random possibilities that I might be able to post to my 70s sci-fi blog.

In a preface to a Ballantine Books edition of Doyle’s The Sign of Four, Wodehouse looked back upon his friendship with Doyle in the 1920s, and recalled that the great author was always somewhat reluctant to discuss Sherlock Holmes with him. “I never could get him to talk of Sherlock Holmes, and I think the legend that he disliked Sherlock must be true. It is with the feeling that he would not object that I have sometimes amused myself by throwing custard pies at that great man.”

One of the most famous “custard pies” that Wodehouse threw at Holmes was the very amusing 1959 Punch piece, “From a Detective’s Notebook,” but he threw perhaps the first pie at the “great man” in 1903, during his early days as a journalist and magazine writer. Wodehouse’s “Dudley Jones, Bore-Hunter,” printed in two parts in the last April and the first May number of Punch neatly parodies Holmes’ adventures by taking the most distinctive elements of Doyle’s stories to an amusingly absurd level. Holmes’ detailed listings of the personal traits of practically everyone in London, Holmes’ violin, Watson’s awe of Holmes’ genius, Holmes’ frequent disguises, and Holmes’ and Watson’s frequent journeys on the midnight mail all come in for some ribbing. There are also references to The Sign of Four (in which Holmes goes to see a man about a dog), “The Speckled Band” (in which a villain “falls into the pit he has digged for another”), and (in the story’s opening paragraph) a parody of “The Final Problem,” in which Holmes had been “killed” by falling into Reichenbach Falls. In fact, at the time Wodehouse wrote “Dudley Jones,” Holmes had been “dead” for ten years and his impending return had only been recently announced by Doyle in The Strand. Wodehouse hailed this joyous occasion with a short poem in a later May number of Punch:

“Oh SHERLOCK, SHERLOCK, he’s in town again,
That prince of perspicacity, that monument of brain.
It seems he wasn’t hurt at all
By tumbling down the waterfall.”

Clearly a must-read.

3. Another short story, this time a recent one, titled The Schrodinger War. I want to read it mainly for the title.

4. This:

It’s more scifi art. I already used it, though, so I don’t know why I didn’t get rid of that link.

5. A YouTube link to the 2013 IT Crowd special that just aired. Go look it up yourself; I don’t want to get it taken down or anything.

There’s a soft spot in my heart for pulp, and especially certain very specific types, like rip-offs of Sherlock Holmes or mad scientists. There’s also a fairly specific type of title that many books have in a series that has continued for so long that the titles must only accomplish two things: evoke as much adventure as possible, and remain as non-descript as possible. This list of pulp titles is no “Devil’s Claw,” “Dutchman’s Ghost,” or “Giant Sumerian Rat.” It’s designed to alert you to titles that can reused as often as you’d like.

Jack Kirby’s series extending the universe of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which ran ten issues from Dec. 1976 to Sep. 1977, may be underwhelming, but it did have a few cool time-jump scenes. Here are the best parts from that series:

Splash pages are the double-page spreads that comic books throw into each issue, just for a little extra wow factor. As a fan of the old-school, 60s-through-80s comic book art, I figured I’d share this awesome flickr photoset that I recently found: a collection of splash pages by the comic great, Jack “King” Kirby.

“Rodney Matthews is generally acknowledged to be among the greatest artists that have ever lived. Need I say more? Please buy this book, and all his other works, because then my immense collection of stuff will become even more valuable.”